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Sun 8 February 2026 12:00, UK
Particularly during the days when you had to hold an album in your hands before you even thought about listening to it, cover art has the potential to make or break an album before it emits a single note. This was a fact that The Rolling Stones were always acutely aware of, hence their plethora of utterly iconic album covers, and the one album cover they were forced to abandon forever.
It was singles that ruled the airwaves for much of the 1960s; tracks like ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ seemed to work better as quick hits of rock and roll adrenaline. As the end of the decade approached, though, the hippie generation began to shift to the long-form artistry of LPs, and The Rolling Stones had a not-insignificant role to play in that cultural shift, particularly with their 1968 masterpiece Beggars Banquet.
Reflecting a pivotal point in the band’s history, when they had emerged from the psychedelic exploration of Their Satanic Majesties and started capturing the counterculture era through revolutionary anthems like ‘Street Fighting Man’, Beggars Banquet was in need of a fittingly wild album cover.
Once the recording was finished in July of 1968, the proposed cover art featured an infamous photograph of a bathroom wall covered in graffiti. However, Decca, the label that had been responsible for The Rolling Stones since their adolescent blues rock days of 1963, refused to allow the album cover on the basis that it featured a toilet. It was perhaps the most Spinal Tap-esque argument the Stones ever encountered.
“Anita [Pallenberg], Mick and I found this wall,” Keith Richards explained during a 2015 chat with Rolling Stone. “Barry Feinstein photographed it. It was a great picture. A real funky cover.” Yet, the record label weren’t convinced. “The fight they [Decca] gave us – we dug in our heels. They really wouldn’t budge. It stopped the album from coming out. Eventually, it got to be too much of a drag. It went on for nine months or so.”
Bizarrely, Decca were so ardently against the album cover that they prevented the album from being released for months, thus preventing themselves from what was clearly going to be a best-seller from one of the most prominent acts on their roster. “It was like them saying. ‘We don’t give a shit if your album never goes out,’” Richards recalled. “After that, we knew it was impossible and started looking around to do it differently.”
During an age in which nobody could seem to distract The Rolling Stones from living the archetypal life of rock and roll hedonism, Decca was seemingly the only people they couldn’t impress. So, when Beggars Banquet was finally released in early December, seven months after it had been finished, it came with a rather dull white cover, with the band’s name and album title written in cursive.
Its uninspiring album cover didn’t stop it from reaching number three in the UK album charts, or breaking into the top five in America, though. In all honesty, The Rolling Stones would have had to release something unimaginably horrible in 1968 for it not to sell well; they were the band of the moment, and they consistently lived up to expectations.
Eventually, public opinion softened on the subject of seeing pictures of toilets, and virtually every reissue of the band’s 1968 record featured the originally intended artwork, which is a big improvement upon the one which Decca eventually came up with. It is no surprise that they left the label shortly thereafter.
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